Toxic Waste
Toxic Waste is the eighteenth level of Crash Bandicoot. Crash is finally closing in on the office of the sinister, and maybe even slightly evil, Chief Executive Officer of Uncle Cortie's Cortex Power Super-Conglomerate Incorporated, Pinstripe Potoroo! Despite being a high-powered executive, for some reason the only way to get to his office is by traversing a long and extremely boring corridor filled with radioactive waste. No wonder he's such a douche. You'd be a douche, too, if you had to put up with that on a daily basis! Speaking of douches, this level introduces Crashie to Cortex Power's Chief Knowledge Officer, Charles "Chuck" Linsey-Woolsey, whose job apparently consists primarily of throwing barrels in a robotic set pattern in the vague hope of, perhaps, achieving something useful of some sort. That job had better pay really fucking well, to make up for the working conditions here, which are - wait for it - barrel-ly legal!!! Ha ha ha! Naughty Dog Brings the Archaic Arcade Home: Naughty Dog Does Not Understand Simple Things Like International Copyright Law, Apparently! Did you know? Nintendo is probably Crashie series developer Naughty Dog's favourite soulless media conglomerate ever! Yes, yes, it's true. Naughty Dog are compu-electrical nerdy horndogs who spend all their waking hours thinking of how to get into Nintendo's collective sweat pants. It's uncommonly common knowledge that this very game itself was originally being developed as the first 3D-in-the-old-2D-sense entry in the Super Mario Bros. series. Really! The Crashiepaedia's Jungle Rollers article says it, so it simply must be true! Of course, Nintendo wasn't so enamoured with the concept of letting scraggly-haired outsiders work on a main-series entry in the Mario series, which was and still is, of course, their beloved legal tender bovine. It was this disappointing revelation that caused Nintendo to ban Naughty Dog from developing for the Nintendo Entertainment System 64. And while this disappointing revelation forced Naughty Dog to reskin this game into a far more generic affair starring the hastily created and soul-crushingly uninteresting Crashie Bandicoot character, they simply weren't ready to entirely stop their pursuit of sexily wooing the Big N yet. Naughty Dog began work on a delightful little title which went by the delightful little moniker of Nintendo's Down-Home Old-Fashioned Museum-Style Antique Cedar Chest Treasury of Dusty Old Arcade Games. It was a radical concept - a retro collection of old arcade games - but it seemed a reasonable risk to make. Naughty von Doggenstein compiled an impressive emulated collection of Nintendo's arcade best, including Heli Fire, Sheriff, Space Firebird, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong 2: DK Somehow Got Laid Whereas You Cannot, Donkey Kong 3: Stanley's Sexy Bug-Spray Bukkake Party, and even Donkey Kong Zero: The Radar Scopening!. Out of sheer boredom, the developers even decided to create all-quasi-new "remixes" of a few of these games - and the most technologically advanced of these was a supercharged 3D-in-the-old-2D-sense Donkey Kong remake, with an updated behind-the-back third-person-in-the-frequently-mistaken-second-person-sense perspective. It was pretty much the single best arcade revival ever created by any human-type organisms ever, and there was pretty much no doubt whatsoever in Naughty Dog's collective BDSM pervert minds that Nintendo would allow it to be published. There was absolutely no way at all for Naughty Dog to foresee Nintendo's illogical objection to introducing a collection of Nintendo's greatest arcade hits on the Nintendo PlayStation Entertainment System, but nonetheless, yes, Nintendo threw a big gay tantrum and had the project brutally murdered, in an apparent locked room scenario that remains unsolved to this today. Executive Producer Mark Cerny was very understandably angry at losing several hours of valuable forced womanizing sexcapades putting work into a fucking video game, that wasn't even going to be released!!! He had to obviously make up for lost time, and he had the perfect plan - just as he found many delightful, practical, and whimsical household uses for his leftover condoms after he developed a "crippling latex allergy", he would find a way to retool the bulk of their work on the compilation - that is, to say, the new part, 3D-in-the-Old-2D-Sense Donkey Kong Remixed Revival Remix Edition - by lazily shoving that code into an entirely unrelated game. And that, my friends, is why Crash Bandicoot contains what is literally a 100% exact remake of the first level of Nintendo's classic arcade game, Donkey Kong. And now you know! To this day, one if left to wonder what might've happened if Naughty Dog had finished Nintendo's Down-Home Old-Fashioned Museum-Style Antique Cedar Chest Treasury of Dusty Old Arcade Games. While we did still get 3D-in-the-Old-2D-Sense Donkey Kong in a virtually unaltered form, one wonders what the all-powerful Programming Gods of Naughty Dog could've achieved with some of Nintendo's other arcade hits. After all, who wouldn't want to relive Stanley's Sexy Bug-Spray Bukkake Party with dynamic camera angles, for extra insecticidal sexiness? Hiroshi Yamauchi is a fucking cunt. Trivia *This level is named after the famous Belfast-based Northern Irish Anarcho-punk band of the same name, active between 1982 and 1986. (Ironically, the band would have hated Dr. Neo Cortex, who owns this level, for he is a professional scientist, and thus, "establishment".) Members from the band later formed the groups DIRT and Bleeding Rectum, neither of which have been used as a level name in the Crash series to date, due in part to the cancellation of Radical's planned 2010 Crashie "game". *It is never explained in-game just what, exactly, these barrels are filled with. One would initially assume that they were filled with toxic waste, of some sort, but if that were the case, then why is the floor here covered in disgusting and deadly toxic waste? Why is the toxic waste on the floor, and not in the barrels? While it is theoretically possible that they simply don't have enough barrels to store all the toxic waste produced by Uncle Cortie's Cortex Power Super-Conglomerate Incorporated, or perhaps even that these barrels were simply poorly manufactured barrels which have big holes that make them leak out all their toxic waste for some queer reason, it's far more likely that the barrels are simply used to store something far more sinister: Cortex Power's non-toxic waste. Being non-toxic, those substances aren't even remotely harmful on their own. So Uncle Cortie makes them harmful, by putting them in awful and evil barrels which are heavy and have a nefarious penchant for rolling uncontrollably toward retarded marsupials! They probably even contain trace amounts of lead, in a blatant safety violation! Scary!